When I Fell From the Sky: The True Story of One Woman's Miraculous Survival by Juliane Diller & Juliane Koepcke & Ross Benjamin & Beate Rygiert

Author:Juliane Diller & Juliane Koepcke & Ross Benjamin & Beate Rygiert [Diller, Juliane & Koepcke, Juliane & Benjamin, Ross & Rygiert, Beate]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, History, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Women, Transportation, Personal Narratives, Airplane Crash Survival, Adventurers & Explorers, Aircraft Accidents, Peru, Aviation
ISBN: 9780983754701
Publisher: Midpoint Trade Books Inc
Published: 2011-11-01T18:00:00+00:00

I had not been back to Panguana for fourteen years. Until recently the presence of the terrorist organization Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru in the area had made any trip into a life-threatening risk. Meanwhile, the original houses in which I had lived with my parents had decayed. My father had hired Moro to build a new guesthouse: a wooden hut on stilts, like all the houses here in the rain forest, with three small rooms and a covered terrace. Now I could take a close look at it for the first time. My husband and I stayed with Moro’s family, who had relocated their farm to the edge of Panguana’s grounds, so that they could better look after everything. And the not-exactly-small film crew managed to pile into the rooms of the guesthouse and onto the deck.

How many memories came back up! The river was still the same, and fortunately the forest too had scarcely changed. The calls of the birds that my mother had studied so extensively, the wonderful lupuna tree towering at its 150-foot height far over all the others, the butterflies and other insects—everything reminded me of those years when my world was still intact. I wandered as in a dream through the places of my childhood, grateful and amazed that I could still move in the rain forest in the exact same way I had learned to do as a child. “It’s like riding a bike,” my husband observed, laughing. “You never forget how to do it.”

We went to Puerto Inca, and there we met Don Marcio, who had brought me to Tournavista back then. It was a really moving encounter for me, after all those years. Along with many others, Don Marcio had helped search for the wreckage for the documentary. Once, he had even set off on his own. Unfortunately, he was injured by a stingray. It stuck its poisonous stinger through Don Marcio’s rubber boot and into his heel, causing his foot to swell intensely and become inflamed. Due to this incident he might almost have died in the jungle, if a boat hadn’t passed by. But since Don Marcio had almost no money with him, these people didn’t want to take him along. So out of necessity he offered them his rifle, a valuable item in the jungle, and so they let themselves be persuaded to take the injured man onto their boat.

I’d heard of his bad luck, and bought back the rifle with Werner Herzog’s help. Now we brought it back to him, a small favor in return for what he had once done for me. At that meeting I said: “Don Marcio, you saved me back then.” But he shook his head and said earnestly: “Not I, but God saved you, Juliana. I only got to be his vessel.”

When we were about to depart in the helicopter that was already waiting for us in Puerto Inca, there was a delay. For the pilot had discovered on an earlier flight that the trees in the clearing where we were supposed to land had not been cut down low enough.